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When a Backup Is Not A Backup
Conceptually the idea of “backup” has become a murky area within IT. Everyone seems to have their own concepts of what a backup is and how they expect it to behave. This can be dangerous when the…
The Software RAID Inflection Point
In June, 2001 something amazing happened in the IT world: Intel released the Tualatin based Pentium IIIS 1.0 GHz processor. This was one of the first few Intel processors (IA32 architecture) to have…
New Hyperconvergence, Old Storage
We all dream of the day that we get to build a new infrastructure from the ground up without any existing technical debt to hold us back. A greenfield deployment where we pick what is best, roll it…
SMBs Must Stop Looking to BackBlaze for Guidance
I have to preface this article, because people often take these things out of context and react strongly to things that were never said, with the disclaimer that I think that BackBlaze does a great…
Logical Volume Managers
A commonly used but often overlooked or misunderstood storage tool is the Logical Volume Manager. Logical Volume Managers, or LVMs, are a storage abstraction, encapsulation and virtualization…
Drive Appearance
One of the more common, yet more tricky fundamental concepts in computing today is the concept of drive appearance or, in other words, something that appears to be a hard drive. This may sound…
The Emperor’s New Storage
We all know the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes. In Hans Christian Anderson’s telling of the classic tale we have some unscrupulous cloth vendors who convince the emperor that they have clothes…
Ferraris and Tractor Trailers
Working in the SMB world, it is actually pretty rare that we need to talk about latency. The SMB world is almost universally focused on system throughput and generally unaware of latency as a need…
The Jurassic Park Effect
“If I may… Um, I’ll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you’re using here, it didn’t require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done and you took the next step. You…
Practical RAID Choices for Spindle Based Arrays
A truly monumental amount of information abounds in reference to RAID storage systems exploring topics such as risk, performance, capacity, trends, approaches and more. While the work on this subject…
Slow OS Drives, Fast Data Drives
Over the years I have found that people often err on the side of high performance, highly reliable data storage for an operating system partition but choose slow, “cost effective” storage for…
Practical RAID Performance
Choosing a RAID level is an exercise in balancing many factors including cost, reliability, capacity and, of course, performance. RAID performance can be difficult to understand especially as…
What is RAID 100?
RAID 10 is one of the most important and commonly used RAID levels in use today. RAID 10 is, of course, what is known as compound or nested RAID where one RAID level is nested within another. In the…
Comparing RAID 10 and RAID 01
These two RAID levels often bring about a tremendous amount of confusion, partially because they are incorrectly used interchangeably and often simply because they are poorly understood. First, it…
The Cult of ZFS
It’s pretty common for IT circles to develop a certain cult-like or “fanboy” mentality. What causes this reaction to technologies and products I am not quite sure, but that it happens is undeniable…
Understanding the Western Digital SATA Drive Lineup (2014)
I choose to categorize Western Digital’s SATA drive lineup for several reasons. One is that WD is the current market leader in spinning hard drives so this makes the categorization most useful to the…
Replicated Local Storage
With the increased exposure of virtualization and the popularization of platform-level high availability solutions because of it the need and awareness of high availability storage has come to the…
When to Consider a SAN?
Everyone seems to want to jump into purchasing a SAN, sometimes quite passionately. SANs are, admittedly, pretty cool. They are one of the more fun and exciting, large scale hardware items that most…
Dreaded Array Confusion
Dreaded Array Confusion, or DAC, is a term given to a group of RAID array failure types which are effectively impossible to diagnose but are categorized by the commonality that they experience no…
The Inverted Pyramid of Doom
The 3-2-1 model of system architecture is extremely common today and almost always exactly the opposite of what a business needs or even wants if they were to take the time to write down their…
Comparing SAN and NAS
One of the greatest confusions that I have seen in recent years is that between NAS and SAN. Understanding what each is will go a long way towards understanding where they are useful and appropriate…
The History of Array Splitting
Much of the rote knowledge of the IT field, especially that of the SMB field, arose in the very late 1990s based on a variety of factors. The biggest factors were that suddenly smaller and smaller…
RAID Notation Examples
As the new Network RAID Notation Standard (SAM RAID Notation) is a bit complex, I felt that it would be useful to provide a list of common use scenarios and specific implementation examples and how…
Network RAID Notation Standard (SAM RAID Notation)
As the RAID landscape becomes more complex with the emergence of network RAID there is an important need for a more complex and concise notation system for RAID levels involving a network component…
One Big RAID 10 – A New Standard in Server Storage
In the late 1990s the standard rule of thumb for building a new server was to put the operating system onto its own, small, RAID 1 array and separate out applications and data into a separate RAID 5…
Choosing RAID for Hard Drives in 2013
After many, many articles, discussions, threads, presentations, questions and posts on choosing RAID, I have finally decided to publish my 2012-2013 high level guide to choosing RAID. The purpose of…
Choosing a RAID Level by Drive Count
In addition to all other factors, the number of drives available to you plays a significant role in choosing what RAID level is appropriate for you. Ideally RAID is chosen ahead of time in…
Hardware and Software RAID
RAID, Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks, systems are implemented in one of two basic ways: software or dedicated hardware. Both methods are very viable and have their own merits. In the small…
Choosing a Storage Type
While technicalities defining which type of storage is which can become problematic, the underlying concepts are pretty well understood. There are four key types of storage that we use in everyday…
Hot Spare or a Hot Mess
A common approach to adding a layer of safety to RAID is to have spare drive(s) available so that replacement time for a failed drive is minimized. The most extreme form of this is referred to as…
When No Redundancy Is More Reliable – The Myth of Redundancy
Risk in a difficult concept and it requires a lot of training, thought and analysis to properly assess given scenarios. Often, because risk assessments are so difficult, we substitute risk analysis…
Choosing an Open Storage Operating System
It is becoming increasingly common to forgo traditional, proprietary storage devices, both NAS and SAN, and instead using off the shelf hardware and installing a storage operating system on it for…
Spotlight on SMB Storage
Storage is a hard nut to crack. For businesses storage is difficult because it often involves big price tags for what appear to be nebulous gains. Most executives understand the need to “store”…
RAID Revisited
Back when I was a novice service tech and barely knew anything about system administration one of the few topics that we were always expected to know cold was RAID – Redundant Array of Inexpensive…
Using GMail to Backup Your Email
When disaster strikes it is a good time to reflect on what preventative measures might have saved the day. Working in IT, as I do, mitigating and even preventing disaster is a big part of the job. No…